Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the first 15 minutes of ten initial Teletandem Oral Sessions (iTOS), which means the first virtual encounter among speakers of different languages who want to study the each other’s language. Our aim is to verify iTOS genre status within a telecollaborative learning environment. We understand genres as communicative events organized in standard structures used by members of a discourse community to achieve their communicative purposes (Swales, 1990) and assume that the teletandem context is composed of a specific community with shared objectives. A study of iTOS had first been proposed by Aranha (2014), who analyzed nine iTOS and identified some recurrence in their discoursal structure. Our data, ten iTOS, are part of a previous version of MulTeC (Multimodal Teletandem Corpus) (Aranha & Lopes, forthcoming) and participants are proficient in Portuguese and English. The video files were transcribed and the sessions were analyzed based on Aranha’s (2014) findings. We identified rhetorical organization for the sessions which was similar to Aranha’s, but varied depending on the learning scenarios, i.e. the learning context in which they occurred.

Author Biographies

Laura Rampazzo is a Doctorate student in Linguistics at UNESP (Sao Paolo State University). She has a Master’s Degree in Linguistics and graduated in Languages (Portuguese/English). Currently, she teaches Portuguese and English at Instituto Federal de São Paulo. Her research interests are on Applied Linguistics, telecollaboration, genres and discourse communities.

Solange Aranha, Sao Paolo State University

Solange Aranha is Assistant Professor at the Modern Languages Department at Sao Paolo State University at São José do Rio Preto (UNESP/ IBILCE). She teaches English and Academic writing for undergraduate students and methodology, genres, EAP and telecollaboration on graduate level. She advises graduate students on telecollaboration studies, genre analysis and teaching and learning technologies. As a researcher, she investigates data on teletandem and is responsible for developing two multimodal corpora: DOTI (Data of Oral Teletandem Interactions) and MulTeC (Multimodal Teletandem Corpus). Her research is sponsored by FAPESP (Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa de São Paulo)

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